No one wanted to volunteer, so I did, and hoped that assigning myself such a difficult task would cancel out my previous cowardice. But even the brave people were trying to protect themselves. The only one willing to touch the sick and hold them and drip cool water into their mouths with a rag was Dice, of course. Dice was our father and didn’t let us down. He slept an hour a night or less, on the sickroom floor. He kept it clean, mopping with vinegar, the scent of which, to this day, brings me back to the impassive mountains.

One night, unable anymore to bear the coughing and snuffling in the long house, I took a blanket to the hayloft. And there in the darkness, I remembered: I could leave. I could walk down to the road. No one would track me, for now. But they could track me later. If I went back to Durham forever, I’d spend all my days looking over my shoulder for Sara and Bay, knowing they could pin me for Pear’s death, if they wanted. And I couldn’t leave for a little while, I couldn’t abandon the family. I’d been waiting for a time like this—a time to be devoted and essential. In the hayloft, buried deep under the gamy blanket, I was thinking of the birds, swifts, who spend ten months at a time on the wing, sleeping, eating, mating on the wing, and then pilots catch sight of them cruising a mile high. They’re hard to study because they’re too good at flying, Dice had said. The natural world was full of things that made me choke up on mystery. And now I finally felt that I’d done it justice.

I wondered whether Dice would let me go to town to buy some medicine. Maybe, in this situation, it’d be okay—I knew bail and bandages were different from medicine, but those purchases had been made out of necessity, and maybe Dice felt the same way now. I could find Annie, the pharmacist, again. I thought fondly of her periwinkle scrubs and her well-rested, angelic, pink, pillowy face. Annie, she’d hand me rattling amber bottles and I’d carry them up here in my pockets.

* * *

Eight were sick, then nine. I, no longer a coward, bundled in three coats, worked for the sheep and the cows. I fed them, watered them, milked them, and cleaned their beds, and every day I left more and more tasks for the next day. The milking alone took three hours in the morning and three again at night. My hands were swollen and sore and I rubbed them with Bag Balm but still they bled. The fingers of my right hand wouldn’t uncoil. I passed the week in a blaze of agony. Every minute that I was awake, I was shoveling or milking, but I couldn’t go fast enough.